Google Inc (GOOG), Ford Motor Company (F), And Sustainable Transit Investing

What we’ve seen, and the one example I have is in Sweden — where they have the world’s largest incentive program for buying hybrid and green cars, and they’ve achieved the world’s largest population of hybrid and green cars — is that CO2 emissions have gone up, ostensibly as a result. Because people feel so good driving around in their super-green cars, that that one moral constraint, or ethical constraint, to driving is gone.

What I’ve seen happen in the U.S. is that the hybrids are getting bigger. Have you noticed this? The hybrids are getting bigger and bigger, and now some of them get worse … there’s a Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) Explorer hybrid that gets half the mileage of a conventional Geo Metro.

Hybrid doesn’t mean anything, except you’re getting potentially better mileage than you would, and by the way, you’ve got a huge battery to get rid of at some point.

The experience is that, thanks to the Jevons paradox — am I pronouncing that right? Look it up, Jevons paradox — it basically shows how, when technology has become more efficient and cheaper to use, we use so much more of it that any gains in efficiency are made up for in increased use of that technology.

Then the driverless car — I read a really good article that I don’t remember the name of, about Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s driverless car, but it’s one of these circumstances where it’s very easy to imagine a long-term outcome in which every car on the street is driverless, but it’s impossible to imagine an intermediate stage.

It’s all wonderful to imagine a future reality, but if you can’t imagine a successful path to that reality, it’s not going to happen, and no one seems to have done that math with the driverless car.

Pino: They’ll have to banish it in certain cities and only allow driverless cars.

Speck: I don’t know, yeah.

The article Buy, Sell, or Hold: Sustainable Transit Edition originally appeared on Fool.com.

Isaac Pino, CPA, owns shares of Google. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Ford and Google.

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